Remembering

Chris Dombrowski has followed his masterful Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish with a brilliant memoir, e River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water (Milkweed, hardbound, 321 pages, $25), a book that speaks in many registers about living a life sculpted by shing, hunting and a love of nature. In prose you could sharpen a knife on, the author accounts for 15 formative years of his life in Western Montana as a poet and shing guide, naturalist and hunter, husband and father. ese were years shing brainy prose, somehow liquid and oaken at once. He knows his way around the tricky eddies of memoir; everything he writes feels like it’s being noticed for the rst time, coming to the page like newly discovered spring water: “I made a single instinctual cast, hooked the trout—it leapt high, knocking caddis from the overhanging willows—and fought it to the shallows ecked with granite and pyrite, small particles of the mountains I could not see but whose peaks I knew stood some miles away, severing land from sky. Holding it loosely underwater, watching its aring gills stir the pebbled streambed, I saw the sh

Western Montana’s brawling rivers and hunting its high country, years of trying to make a living, getting married, starting a family. Dombrowski understands that we live life traversing watersheds, actual and metaphoric. He is rst and foremost a river creature: “When I leave the river’s company for extended periods of time, I feel like I’ve been torn from it, missing it the way a young child might miss a cherished pillow or plush animal. Which is not to say that rivers are gentle teachers: What are they if not infallible authorities on gravity, force, and obstacles?” e Bitterroot and the Big Blackfoot and other waters led him to a livelihood that complemented his writing life and allowed him to move forward with an extraordinary sense of wholeness.

A gifted poet, Dombrowski writes in earthy, as an elemental composite of its entire surround.” e heart of this book is the author’s journey into the thrilling expectations and unfathomable anxieties of marriage and fatherhood. No Hallmark cliches or sitcom hijinks, just a remarkable attentiveness to his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his two children, events that form the braided headwaters of his happiness. at story is woven with his love of nature and language. He o ers a view of life in Western Montana somehow una ected by its recent gentri cation, as well as judgments about what history has done to nature and people, how carelessness and injustice dim the future we want for ourselves and our children. Among many other gems, there’s a ne essay about his friendship with the late Jim Harrison, another Michigan boy who needed bigger country to stretch his soul. I can’t do justice to a book as perfect in tone as this, so generous in pace and written with the inviting but dangerous intensity of rivers—of gravity, force and the obstacles between remembering the past, living in the present and believing in the future.

Like Chris Dombrowski, Michael Garrigan traces some of his DNA as a poet to the late Jim Harrison. e rest derives from the world around him—family, woods, waters, history, myth. His new book of poems, River, Amen (Wayfarer Books, softbound, 124 pages, $25) is also ribboned with rivers: “River birch and rhododendrons / hemlocks and heartaches of lost sh, / Fall in love with river bends because they always bend again.” is ne volume of poetry “wanders down hills and across ravines...and eventually nds its way into the genetics of the forest, where everything grows or rusts. Garrigan writes poetry rooted in real experiences that reveal unadorned truths. He assays the truth in Pennsylvania’s hard-used coal country, the pathos of abandoned railbeds, the messages of petroglyphs, the slither of snakeheads up the Susquehanna. He enjoys the beauty of brook trout and shad, dainty sulfurs and fat green drakes, skittering caddis and erratic boulders. He takes his love of wild places to the Penobscot and the Androscoggin where big wild water teaches him things. Hungry and imaginative, he skins a woodchuck and spies “Buddha in a red canoe.” He confronts history and rural rustbelt realities: “ is fractured land holds me with its coal dust clinging to everything.” But he still nds places to wander that “are more rivers than roads.”

Amid it all, Garrigan knows balance is the thing: “ is is the balance of being we seek—casting a y rod while standing in a canoe.” And he nds, and accepts, unending mystery: “Each river swallows everything, keeping hidden what we are called to.”

Ron Ellis writes with an unvarnished clarity that e ortlessly—for the reader if not the writer— reveals the depth and complexity of his outdoor experiences. is was evident in his ne rst book, Cogan’s Woods: A Celebration of Hunting, Family, and Kentucky, and appears again in full, quiet force in

Yonder: Tales from an Outdoor Life (Prauss Press, hardbound, 160 pages, $30). Ellis writes out of Kentucky, a name with enduring resonance, still a “border state” in interesting ways—a hinge between east and Midwest, a stir of north and south with a rich hunting and shing tradition. In short essays you can sip like Bourbon, the author writes of his home woods with all the a ection and understanding of his rst book. He also ranges about, mostly pursuing grouse in other unsung places in the Upper Midwest and Western New York. And he shes for wild trout in the Great Smoky Mountains, where he keeps a cabin. e short essays that comprise this book are wellrendered narratives of ordinary experiences worth remembering: nding woodcock while hunting for grouse in Michigan, taking his rst bird dog a eld, hunting grouse the February after his father died. A thoroughly contemporary voice, Ellis has warm roots in the classic outdoor writing of Burton Spiller, William Harnden Foster, Dana Lamb, George Bird Evans and Frank Woolner.

I much admire the intimate scale of this apparent miscellany of essays that has so many strong unifying elements. All of Ellis’s local loves—coverts and streams, dogs and ushes, woods and elds—loom large on the page. And in Kentucky apparently, anything worth doing is done outdoors: shing for bluegills and pumpkinseeds with one’s father and grandfather, molding doughballs for carp, duck hunting, deer hunting, turkey hunting and, of course, ushing grouse out of autumn woods. A life held together by country things where redemption is found in the outdoors: “Within sight of the creek, I drift into the welcoming quiet of a sacred space protected by trees and running water, a place rich in everlasting memories, and, on this evening, a place marked by a slant of light bending toward hope, perhaps.” All this accompanied by a lifetime of bird dogs and the company of friends and family. “Box of Light,” a ne homage to his father’s memory, is perhaps where the book was headed all along. As he notes at the end of one hunting day: “with the sun sliding down to the horizon and the cigar smoke drifting to the heavens, I decided that it felt just like religion.” S